Monthly Archives: November 2013

Stand aside, from-scratch croissants. Out out, damn osso bucco! For all of the satisfactions of spatula-and-tongs-ing your way up culinary K2’s nothing produces quite the same glow as transforming 3 eggs, 2 cups of flour and bit of semolina into a pound of Fresh Tagliatelle. Making your own pasta is akin to making your own pie crust, one of those notches on the wooden spoon that certifies you as a cook. Contrary to reputation, it is neither difficult nor arduous, and only mildly time-consuming (30 – 40 minutes, start to finish). We’ve wanted to do this post for awhile, if only to give everyone who makes one of our pasta dishes a place to go for instructions on making their own. After you taste your first batch of homemade, you’ll marvel at your abilities, those you feed will sing your hosannas (or you’ll kill them) and while you may not entirely give up buying commercial noodles, you’ll know that your own taste better.

The good news is you get a great pasta sauce this week. The bad news is you get the pasta part of the post next week. We thought asking you to make both the sauce and the fresh pasta would be asking too much, so this week we’re doing Rialto Bolognese, enough sauce for three meals. Next week we’ll be posting Fresh Tagliatelle. You can wait until then to bring them together, or simply use a pound of your favorite fresh wide noodle pasta and jump the gun. In fact, the great thing about a sauce like this is having it on hand, ready to go, for a meal when all you have to do make the pasta.

Back in 2001, when we were working on our cookbook, farro was still rare. If you went to the right restaurants, if you frequented the vortices of culinary hipness. Italian delis, in New York or San Francisco maybe. Specialty food stores, the occasional sighting. How the world has turned in a dozen years! Now you can often buy farro in grocery stores, which is a good thing if you want to make this week’s Tomato – Farro Soup.

Who doesn’t love sweet potatoes? Culinary gravity inexorably pulls them toward brown sugar or molasses or something candied, even with bacon (candied bacon). But don’t do it, at least not this time. I never encountered a sweet potato during my year abroad in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, a stone’s throw from the town of Gruyères (town, plural: cheese, singular), but I can guarantee that that if there were ever a culinary match made in heaven it’s sweet potato and that most hazelnut and butter flavored of all cheeses, aged Gruyère. Some cheeses should never be melted (sorry, brie en croute is ghastly) but Gruyère is just the opposite. Quiche, the poster child of boring French food from the ’70’s, is redeemed by the addition of aged Gruyère. Fondue without Gruyère is but a pale revenant of the real deal. Gruyère is expensive (around $20/lb.) but the recipe only calls for a cup and half of the stuff, grated, about 3 ounces. Unfortunately, I only found out about the Gruyère after the ingredients photograph had been taken. Jody announced that she’d added Gruyère–I couldn’t even photograph it being stirred into the bowl. I growled and stomped around. I should have waited until I tasted the finished pie. Gruyère and sweet potatoes rule.

Two kinds of cooks entertain at home: those who want guests in their kitchen, and those who don’t. Fried Stuffed Olives are definitely for the former. Filled with pork, salami, mortadella and cheese, these little bits of indulgence are best while still warm. Out of the pan and into the mouth, with only a minute or two in between. That means people nearby, glass of wine in hand, paper towel at the ready. Cook, drain, eat. Fun all round.